Welcome to a new series of blogs that I am putting together. If there is enough interest, I can continue this, so if you have suggestions and I can work it in, I will try to work through some blogs to answer your questions!

For this blog, I wanted to point out that Avnet maintains instructions on what we recommend as a useful build environment for Xilinx tools. This has been maintained since the 2014.4 version of tools. It has become one of our most popular downloads!

We try to bring all of the notes, comments, feedback from the various corners of the web, including our vast network of experienced field team, customers, suppliers, etc. all to a single point to make it easy to find what you need to be successful!

Knowing that a lot of people do not have access to infinite memory, both in hard drive and ram, we go through a test of the tools and ensure that we recommend not only the optimal configuration but can also provide a minimum configuration. To help you make an educated final decision, we also try to provide how we came to that recommendation so you can adjust for your specific needs! In the current version, I have included a complete breakdown using the current Vitis platform builds for the Ultra96V2.

Using this document's flow, you will be able to create a successful build environment that while might not be the MOST efficient*, it will be successful in creating a project from scratch all the way to successful deployment!

This document started as a way for Avnet's customers to create a uniform environment for training. We quickly saw that customers would struggle to setup with own environments at their office. Using this flow, you are penalized in that it is a virtual environment, but you get the benefits of snapshots, as well as being able to preserve that environment indefinitely. This is especially useful when you have to archive tools and support environments for products with VERY long life spans! There is also nothing stopping you from creating a full installation on a build machine, similar steps can be taken to get all the "little" important bits for the tools. Talking with customers, the VAST majority appear to use the FULL document, but there is a growing percent that is using JUST the tool section to ensure their tools function.